How Samara Pearce and her great-grandfather documented Russia’s starvation of Ukrainians, 90 years apart

Photographer Samara Pearce and Peter Berman at the Holodomor memorial bench in De Waal Park, Cape Town. (Photo: Olga Shmaidenko, Ukrainian Association of South Africa)

By Peter Fabricius

6 Mar 2025

The documentary film Family Album, which screened in Cape Town and Pretoria last week, tells the story of Samara Pearce and her great-grandfather, who both documented the suffering of Ukrainians.

Samara Pearce has the image of a classic Leica Mark II 35mm camera tattooed on her chest, close to her heart. It speaks of her love of photography and of Ukraine.

She accidentally stumbled upon her historical link to the documentation of the suffering of Ukraine and acquired her vocation in 2012.

“I went to my grandfather’s house (in London) and he had a very old Leica on his table. And I asked him how come he had this Leica because I hadn’t seen him photograph.

“And he said if you take the Leica and go and speak to your grandmother she’ll tell you the story of a genocide. So I took it to my grandmother and she explained how she lived through a genocide called Holodomor in Kharkiv in 1933 with her mother and father.”

Her grandmother’s father – Samara’s great-grandfather, Alexander Wienerberger – had recorded the man-made famine with his Leica, taking about 600 photographs and smuggling some of them out of the country in a diplomatic bag to his native Austria.

Wienerberger, a chemical engineer, was a remarkable man, highly resourceful and very brave. He had fought in World War 1 for the Austrians against the Russians and had been captured. Because of his engineering expertise, the Bolsheviks who took power in Russia in 1917 kept him in the country after the war to run a sucrose factory in Kharkiv, Ukraine, and other enterprises.

He became quite successful. But he managed to get out and return to Austria in 1934.

His daughter later moved to England to study nursing which was how Samara turned out to be British. She says that until she spoke to her grandmother about it in 2012, her grandmother had not spoken of the Holodomor before – possibly because she was traumatised.

Her grandmother’s account and the rediscovery of two albums of Alexander’s photographs, which her grandmother had forgotten about, inspired Samara to dedicate her photographic career to Ukraine, including the Holodomor, and the current Russian-Ukrainian war.

Read more: War in Ukraine

She visited Ukraine a few times after that and in 2018 interviewed Ukrainian soldiers in the eastern Donbas region, visiting areas that “had been wiped out in the most awful ways by the Russian army called separatists”, she says, referring to Russia’s clandestine invasion of Ukraine under the guise of a separatist uprising by Russian-speaking Ukrainians.

As a result, she was invited by the Ukrainian culture minister to do an exhibition of her work at the Holodomor Museum in Kyiv. She met the Ukrainian cinematographer Maryana Tkachuk and they decided to make a film which linked the 1932/1933 Holodomor to the current war because, in both cases, food was being weaponised against Ukrainians.

Samara and Maryana began filming in September, travelling to Ukraine and retracing Alexander’s footsteps to Kharkiv where he had photographed such devastating images of the dead and dying in the 1930s. This was also where the Russians had again wrought such destruction in 2022 during their occupation of the city from February to May 2022 at the start of their full-scale invasion before being expelled from Kharkiv in a remarkable counteroffensive.

The result of that expedition is the wrenching documentary Family Album, which premiered at the Warsaw Film Festival in 2024 and screened in Cape Town and Pretoria last week.

The Holodomor

“Holodomor” is a composite of the Ukrainian words Holod (hunger) and Mor (extermination). In 1929, Joseph Stalin launched his programme of agricultural collectivisation which forced millions of peasants off their own land and onto collective farms.

“The result was a catastrophic famine, the most lethal in European history,” as distinguished journalist and historian Anne Applebaum writes in her definitive account, Red Famine: Stalin’s War on Ukraine.

At least five million people died of starvation in the USSR between 1931 and 1933. Applebaum documents how a highly disproportionate number of those, more than 3.9 million, were Ukrainians. Stalin decided to starve them, stealing the last crust of bread or sheaf of wheat from their homes, not only to save Russian lives but deliberately to exterminate Ukrainians, to rid himself of a political problem – rising Ukrainian nationalism.

Read more: Ukraine Crisis Archives

Applebaum also relates how the world turned a blind eye to what was happening, ignoring the desperate appeals for action by the Archbishop of Vienna, Cardinal Theodor Innitzer, for instance. Innitzer’s cry for help was based on the photographs that Alexander Wienerberger had smuggled out of Kharkiv to the church.

They showed starving people lying on the sides of roads, empty houses, armed men guarding grain stores and mass graves. Applebaum published many of them in her book. Samara points out one which shows a man dying in a yard, another one shows him dead.

“He photographed him dying over three days. He knew he was too far gone to save. He didnæt have the resources to save him.”

Returning to famine

The documentary Family Album follows Samara from her home in London to great-grandfather Alex’s birthplace, Vienna, to inspect the archbishop’s archive of Alex’s photographs.

Then she travelled onto Ukraine, visiting Kharkiv 90 years after the events her great-grandfather photographed, and found a city and region which had once again been tormented by the Russians. She interviewed two old women who still remembered the Holodomor and who had also just survived the 2022 occupation, including being deprived of food. One woman was 100 when they spoke to her, and died days later.

Holodomor Ukraine Photographer Samara Pearce and Peter Berman at the Holodomor memorial bench in De Waal Park, Cape Town. (Photo: Olga Shmaidenko, Ukrainian Association of South Africa)

She also interviewed other survivors of occupation, including police officers who had to take over old Soviet-era police stations which the Russians had used to torture Ukrainian children to try to force them to speak Russian and to renounce their Ukrainian language and culture.

She photographed mass graves like the ones her great-grandfather photographed in 1933, though this time the dead were victims of the brutal occupation of 2022. She interviewed a man who took it upon himself to collect the bodies and bury them together outside the city.

She interviewed a woman who was the only person who had refused to abandon her village near Kharkiv when the Russians invaded. The Russian soldiers tormented her, firing into her kitchen even as they forced her to pick her own vegetables and cook for them.

This was one link Samara established between the famine of 1933 and the famine of 2022.

But more generally, she documented how the Russians had denied food to the local Ukrainians in 2022.

“They started removing grain from the fields and then behind that they would mine the fields so they couldn’t be replanted.”

She says some Ukrainians were executed, while others were enslaved to help feed and otherwise look after the Russian forces.

The Russians cut all the electric pylons and then mined the ground all around the pylons so that after the occupying forces had been forced out and electricians tried to restore the electricity, several were killed. It was a kind of booby trap.

That has left many people without power to this day.

The documentary records how one of the largest farms in Kharkiv district remains fully mined and unusable for farming. The owner told her that when Russia occupied this area three years ago, the Ukrainians discovered that the Russians were using the farm as a massive military base. The farmer had to give the military the coordinates of his farm buildings so they could bomb them.

So his farm was destroyed by Ukrainian munitions. Then he enlisted in the military to fight the Russians and was part of the unit that pushed them back across the border.

The farmer tells her in the film that the decision to help Ukraine destroy his farm was “sad but not difficult”. He would do it again if he had to.

South African connection

There is a South African connection to the Holodomor. Whereas Alexander Wienerberger found himself in Ukraine involuntarily as a Russian prisoner of war, Capetonian Jerry Berman, also an engineer – though civil rather than chemical – chose to go there in 1932, both from a sense of adventure and also because it was in the Great Depression and he couldn’t find work at home, his son, Peter, says.

Like Wienerberger, though, he was also disturbed by the evidence he witnessed of the deliberate famine unfolding around him.

“He had thought that Stalin’s system was different from the West, like they wouldn’t have a depression. But it turns out that he was stealing all the Ukrainian grain and selling it to the West.”

Read more: The daily lives of Ukrainians are hard and every picture is worth a thousand terrible words

Berman recounted this and other observations in several letters he wrote to his friend, Meir Fortes, in London.

“He noticed, for instance, that his workers weren’t being fed, whereas he was getting plenty of food.”

The family donated Berman’s letters to the Holodomor Museum in Kyiv and they are now being regarded as a rare and valuable eyewitness testimony to an atrocity which Russia was trying to hide.

Peter was a guest of honour at the screening of Family Album at Cape Town’s Labia Theatre.

“The images my great-grandfather captured stood as silent witnesses to an unspeakable genocide, and today history is repeating itself,” Samara said at the screening.

“My art is not just about remembrance but resistance. I want the world to understand that this war is not only about land – it is about identity, truth and the right to exist. In a world overflowing with disinformation, documenting the truth has become a weapon in itself.”

Ukraine’s ambassador to South Africa, Liubov Abravitova, emphasised the need for international solidarity, drawing parallels between Ukraine’s fight for survival and South Africa’s history of resisting oppression.

Dzvinka Kachur, a researcher and activist and leading member of the Ukrainian Association of South Africa, warned that “allowing Russia to act with impunity in Ukraine sets a dangerous precedent that threatens African nations as well”. DM

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World

The Holodomor

Returning to famine

South African connection